From what I've seen, people who focus on things like "bullet sponginess" and "god tier" generally don't like it. People who don't care as much about stuff like that and look for worldbuilding and story love it.

Personally, I think people who are looking for perfect gameplay are looking at the wrong things in cyberpunk. If you want an awesome shooter, go play overwatch or something, you don't play Cyberpunk because it has perfect gameplay, you play it because of the world they built.

I'm about 6 hours in on the dlc, I had a level 37 cyberdeck build I used going into it, playing on normal difficulty...I'm pretty godly, but the cyberdeck builds have always been OP. The rebalanced skill trees encourage you to max out 2-3 stats and dump the rest. All in all, the game finally feels like what was promised at launch. I respecced into a couple other build types just to try them out, I REALLY enjoy the combat with the blades, I felt like a futuristic cyber samurai. All in all, I'm really enjoying it, crank up the difficulty if you want more of a challenge for sure. Not sure if it was worth a total of $90 us, and a three year wait after release for a completed game, but so far I'm really liking it. The dlc gives me escape from New York crossed with new Vegas vibes. Try it again with the free update and decide from there, if you like the gameplay, then totally get phantom liberty!

In my opinion it's not, the gameplay is still terrible and the writing nothing special.

I've played through it twice after the sale around the release of Edgerunners. Had a great time. I loved the story and I got completely absorbed into the world. I just played after the 2.0 updated and the game seems even more fun now, at least at high level. So yeah, it's good now and it was good a year ago. There's still some bugs every now and then, but most of them are just "charming" bugs like cars getting launched, spawning in wrong places, etc. Taste is personal though, maybe RPG diehards or something might not like it.

honestly in my opinion, at least on PC, cyberpunks always been pretty good, now it's better

I played it originally upon release and my biggest problem with the game was that none of the RPG elements mattered. It also felt more like a linear campaign with various irrelevant side missions.

Is it still pretty much the same in that regard?

Yes, it finally lost Early Access

Hell yeah. In my top ten games. It was good at 1.6 as well, 2.0 adds a whole new stack of cool shit though.

I love it now, everything feels punchy because you're not gated around finding new weapons every level. I'm sticking almost exclusively with the iconics that can be upgraded, but as far as I can tell the only difference between generic weapons is the tier they're in, the damage appears to be the same no matter what level you find the weapon at. Some other changes:

• Armor is tied primarily to cyberware now, which has a limited capacity based on level and a handful of perks that increase the cap.
• Cyberware has impactful changes to playstyle, granting new bonuses like higher melee attack speed, increased RAM, or restoring a portion of stamina on kill
• Perks have drastically increased effects that often come with conditions that encourage active playstyles (e.g. 50% faster grenade recharge if you have no charges left)
• Healing items and grenades have a pool of charges rather than being single-use.
• Natural healing is faster, but healing items are less immediately accessible (No more sucking down inhalers in the middle of a firefight)
• All the Skills have been consolidated into just five that correspond roughly to the five attributes' associated weapons, and they level quickly. Every five levels grants a bonus associated with the attribute (Netrunning (Quickhacks/Smart Weapons) increases max RAM and RAM recharge speed, for example)
• Weapon upgrades are no longer gated by Tech
• Clothes are almost entirely cosmetic. Any that grant mechanical benefits (Armored vests, for example) can be worn under outfits comprised of any clothing you have in your closet.

God I hate that stuff. I remember playing The Division and doing tens of thousands of points of headshot damage after billions of bullets to those shotgun dudes who insta-kill you no matter where they shoot you.

It always had been good. It’s even better now

one of my friends, who is really nitpicky and had a really strong opinion on the former versions of the game told me it's good now. I myself can't play it, I have a 2010 era machine...

I started playing just before the Netflix show came out and I loved it, it quickly became one of my favorite open world car games, in the same tier as San Andreas and Sleeping Dogs.

By the end I became completely unstoppable, I played as a melee netrunner and it was insane. I didn't really mind because the story and world more than made up for it.

Curious myself. I played it shortly after launch, and while the atory and the worldbuilding was really great, the gameplay was flawed due to the severe lack of polish.

I concluded back when the DLC was announced that the game deserved a revisit, especially now that I have a proper PC on which to run it, so here I am.

Well, your biggest issue is easily fixed by adjusting the difficulty...

I started playing again for 2.0 on hard, and most enemies went down with a single sniper headshot. The ones who didnt were the ones where they had a split health bar, so it was easy to tell if it would.